2. Be yourself. Trust your own intuition. Writing needs to be fun for you (and the likelihood that you’ll sell goes up)

One of the most common questions I get from people new to product creation is: will it sell? Honestly, no one knows. That’s why big publishers publish so many books. Most won’t become bestsellers. Indeed, most will be lucky if their authors “earn out”.

The best advice anyone can give you is: trust yourself. Believe in your own ideas. Yes, keep the marketplace in mind. New Adult is a highly popular fiction genre at the moment, and if you read these books with pleasure, you can probably write them.

Apps for Inspiration: Get Inspired on Demand

Can you demand inspiration from yourself? I doubt it. If you try to force inspiration, you’ll choke. However, you can create the right conditions for inspiration to land on you – like the blue bird of happiness. :-)

I’ve come up with seven apps I use which help me to get inspired more or less on demand. The apps create the conditions in which you’re likely to become inspired. They’re in no particular order.

1. Blog General Information: News, Reviews and Freebies.

This one’s easy. What new books are coming out in your category (nonfiction), or genre (fiction)? Blog about them. Yes, you’re promoting others. Maybe they will return the favor, who knows? Here’s what happens when you blog about new books and other news: you become known, because you’re knowledgeable. Many, many authors take this route to build their platform, and sell their books, and you can too.

Much as they’d love to blog, these writers want to do it FAST. I sympathize. Writing at book length takes focus and energy. It’s a challenge to blog as well as write your book… But if you want readers, it’s necessary. Believe it or not, it’s huge fun too.

The most difficult part is getting started. Once you’ve made a couple of posts, you’ll be able blog in five minutes or less.

Let’s look at three no-hassle ways you can blog your book in the shortest possible time. I defy any writer to tell me that he has “no time to blog” with these methods.

Writing coaching can help

If you can articulate your challenge, coaching can help. Indeed coaching can prevent disaster. One of my students was ready to delete all the files related to a book she’d worked on for three years. I managed to convince her that such drastic action wasn’t necessary. She’s completed a proposal for her book, and we’re shopping it around literary agents.

Another student wanted to develop a money-making blog, but because there were so many large “authority” blogs in her niche, she’d was intimidated. She felt that her blog would struggle: how could she compete?

I’ve just been chatting with a writing student who thinks that his writing is going too slowly. He’s written the first draft of a nonfiction book, and is frustrated because he thinks he should be moving through the revision more quickly.

Sadly, he’s lost perspective. In the time we’ve been working together, not only has he planned and written an ebook, he’s planning another one. That’s huge progress.

I suggested that he get a timer, then work at his revision for two or three 25 minute sessions each day. When he’s not working, he should forget about the book, and let his subconscious deal with it.

1. Set targets for how many queries you’ll send out per day/ week

Most writers adore research, and we can research endlessly, kidding ourselves that research is “work.” So set targets now. At the height of my magazine writing, I produced FIVE queries a day, five days a week: 25 queries a week.

I’d mix up the magazine querying with sending proposals to businesses, because many magazines pay on publication; often a month or two after publication. I like being PAID, so business writing kept my motivation high.

Bottom line: focus on building relationships, people. It’s not all about you!

So stop with the whining over here about how Amazon sucks or blah blah doesn’t work (nothing is magical), pull up your big girl and big boy pants, and spend that effort writing your next blog post, book, or tweet. Or yell at me for bitching at you. I don’t care. I won’t be here.

$18,000 advance from Penguin to do a Complete Idiot’s guide. Payable in 3 installments, begging required to be paid money owed.
15% to agent
purchase of all supplies.
hire 3 illustrators to do the artwork the publisher doesn’t provide but requires out of the blue. (Second one took off on vacation to Scotland without finishing the work and slammed her hand in a pub door in Glasgow so she was unable to finish. Paid third one double to meet deadline.)
purchase of camera to take photos publisher suddenly requires not mentioned in contract. Luckily I didn’t have to hire a photog.

$2.99 and $3.99 are currently the pricing sweet spots for most e-book bestsellers. In general, authors who price their books modestly earn more than those whose average price is higher, but 99 cents is “no longer the path to riches.”

Readers prefer longer e-books. In fact, bestselling books tend to be over 100,000 words. This came as a big surprise to us.

Series books outsell standalone books -- but series books under 50,000 words are at a sales disadvantage.

Free still works as a marketing tool, especially when an author offers the first book in a series for free, but it is much less effective than before -- primarily because so many authors are taking advantage of it.

Gmail’s labels and its filtering work, but they need a little help. Signing up for regular mailings with a special Gmail address means that you can filter your email more efficiently.

I especially like David Nield’s idea of creating a Gmail address for your To Do list, by adding “+todo” to the email address before the “@”. I always find myself emailing tasks to myself while I’m out and about, so that’s very useful — I can now filter out my To Dos from the rest of my email.

Self publishing authors can learn a lot from Julie Smith’s commitment to quality. All books need editors, and that includes self published books. Can’t afford professional editing? You can always trade editing tasks with a fellow author, if money’s tight.

You can also take to heart that you’re running a business, and as you can see from booksBnimble, businesses take time to grow. That doesn’t mean you need to rush and self publish your ebooks before they’re ready. However, the more ebooks you have available, the more you will sell.

How to avoid judging your writing while you’re writing…

Set a goal for your writing, in writing. Write about what you want to achieve in a couple of sentences. Example: “In this scene, I want to introduce the prime suspect. Our detective realizes that he’s lying about where he was on the night of the murder.”

Writing success: if your writing doesn’t succeed, keep writing.

Writers get fixated on projects. A project becomes all-important. So important, that to avoid failure, they let the project die.

Why not do as Beck did? Publish. See what happens. If you keep writing, you won’t obsess. Some years ago I had a multi-book contract with a publisher. One day I was lunching with my editor, who was worried about another book coming out on a similar topic to the one I was working on. I shrugged and said: “it’s just a book.”